Financial constraints often mean that small hydroelectric plants run unattended and hence the recording and monitoring of the performance of the plant relies on, sometimes infrequent, visits by appropriate personnel. The LabView package has appeared on the market and this enables the creation of "Virtual Instruments" which can display, on the screen of a PC, measured quantities such as are required at a typical small hydroelectric power station. The use of a PC based metering scheme gives rise to numerous added benefits; the measured data can be stored in the memory of the PC to allow subsequent downloading and analysis; the data can be analysed by other software to detect and predict fault conditions, i.e. to perform a condition monitoring function; and the data can be interrogated remotely by a suitable communications link to enable analysis and monitoring, effectively from anywhere in the world. During the 1996/97 session, two final year Honours projects were running at Napier University which related to the use of affordable PC based systems, the first performing a metering function, and the second performing a fault prediction function. This paper reviews maintenance strategies and condition monitoring techniques and then describes the development and outcomes of the two projects (a generator monitoring system and a condition monitoring and fault prediction program).
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